Public health officials are counting on such methodical contact tracing coupled with aggressive testing as the nation’s strategy to combat the coronavirus.
Still, other than keeping stay-at-home orders firmly in place, public health officials say rapid testing and contact tracing give states the best chance to slow the virus and restart the economy crippled by the highest rate of unemployment since the Great Depression. And as states ease stay-at-home restrictions and allow people to return to work, shopping and social activities, testing and tracing the contacts of infected people will become crucial.
“It’s going to be significant effort to build the contact tracing capacity that we need in this nation,” he said. “Everybody is impatient and ready to start reopening society and the economy,” Plescia said. “Unless we have some kind of infection control mechanism in place, it’s just a matter of time until we rev right back up into the same situation we’re starting to recover from.”Brummert was impressed by the efficiency of Mecklenburg County health department's investigation.
"We’ve enacted measures in our stores to help ensure proper social distancing, including floor markers to help our customers be mindful of how close they are to others, and we have installed protective panels at our pharmacy counters and front-store checkout stations in all stores," DeAngelis said. On April 2, she went to the local emergency room in what she described as “respiratory distress,” and was prescribed the antibiotic azithromycin and the breathing treatment albuterol. Her chest X-ray was filled with what she said appeared to be “white smoke.” She wasn’t hospitalized because “our hospitals were overwhelmed with people who needed to be on ventilators,” she said.
North Carolina is working to rapidly expand its ranks of contact tracers under the state's newly adopted Carolina Community Tracing Collaborative. Partners in Health contact tracers are making thousands of calls a day to Massachusetts communities hard hit the virus. With the stay-at-home orders leaving thousands of workers furloughed or laid off, there’s no shortage of applicants. Partners in Health has hired more than 1,000 from a pool of about 40,000 people who applied for positions in the state, said John C. Welch, director of partnerships and operations for the MA Covid Response project.
The CDC defines a close contact as someone within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes. The agency recommends close contacts of an infected person should stay home and monitor symptoms until 14 days after a known exposure. “Those areas have had relatively high transmission rates populated by a lot of working class individuals,” he said. “These are the folks who are keeping food on our table, keeping gas in our cars and keeping our hospitals clean. Those folks are experiencing the burden of disease transmission.”to encourage people to pick up the phone. Many were ignoring calls because they feared being scammed or getting an unwanted call.
He advocates a more limited approach: Public health workers contacting infected individuals and encouraging them to stay home until they recover. While the hospital caters to patients with more serious complications from COVID-19, Fallieras wonders about patients like himself, those with mild symptoms or symptoms different from those most commonly described.
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